A while ago Alexa updated the stats that they display – with a heavy dose of keywords, upstream/downstream, and demographic on each site.

While responding to an email about where yellowpages.ca traffic comes from, I did a bit of digging –

According to Alexa, YellowPages.ca gets 40% of its traffic from Google. Yelp clocks in at 54%, whereas a pure-SEO play like MerchantCircle comes in at 70%.

But if you check the keywords, you can see that YellowPages.ca’s traffic is dominated by synonyms of yellow pages. The other two cannot claim as such (in fact, according to Alexa, the #2 keyword for MC is ‘boysfood’ a popular porn site).